Lightning Experience

Lightning Experience is a next generation Salesforce UI that delivers many new features to benefit sales teams of all sizes. Salesforce did more than develop just a new “skin”. They redesigned how Salesforce works. It has been described as not just a new UI but a whole new operating system. It literally changes the way sales users work with information in Salesforce.

Salesforce has been working on this upgrade for a number of years now with its inception beginning with mobile. With the heavy adoption of smart phones and tablets users have become accustomed to the fast, responsive designs of a well-developed mobile application. Salesforce decided to take the lessons learned from Salesforce1 and apply them to the desktop to help users sell smarter and sell faster.

Considerations Before Enabling

Like any new software product, Lightning Experience is in its infancy and will evolve over time. It’s available to the general public as part of Winter ’16. It will take some time before every feature or function in Salesforce is supported. As of right now, there are a number of things that are not yet available. For example, if your organization is using Person Accounts, at this time you will not be able to use Lightning Experience. Salesforce will be adding this ability to Lightning Experience very soon however. A few other features not yet available, but likely to come soon, include: Assets, Campaigns and Campaign Members, Contracts, Forecasts (critical for many sales organizations), and more. For a list of features not currently available in Lightning go to Salesforce’s page, What’s Not Available in Lightning Experience. Be sure to read through this before you take the plunge.

Turning on Lightning Experience

Salesforce has purposefully made it simple to enable the Lightning Experience. They made sure that we could slowly turn it on in our organization and try it out. When you enable Lightning Experience it will only be available by permission. This allows administrators to setup permissions for a select group of users to pilot. This is always a recommended first step to implementing any new upgrade. Of course, this comes after testing in Sandboxes to make sure your current business processes continue to work as expected.

To enable Lightning Experience in your org, navigate to the Setup menu and click on Lightning Experience. You’ll be brought to a page with information, resources, and a number of supporting features for your consideration such as Account Insights, Social Accounts, and Notes. Once you’ve selected which features to enable, move on to the permissions.

The easiest thing to do is to create a Permission Set for Lightning Experience. Give the Permission Set a name that’s easy to refer to such as Lightning Experience User and grant it the permission “Lightning Experience User”. You’ll be able to assign this permission set to one or more users allowing for a controlled roll-out.

Now that you have the features selected and the permissions set up, the only other thing to do is to turn it on!